Sekisui Chemical has developed a material that can triple the capacity of lithium ion batteries, allowing electric vehicles to travel about 600km on a single charge — roughly as far as gasoline-powered cars can go without refilling.

The new material stores electricity using silicon instead of conventional carbon-based materials. The company’s silicon alloy overcomes the durability issue that had kept silicon from being used.

Sekisui Chemical also developed a new material for the electrolyte, which conducts electricity within the batteries. This eliminates the need for equipment to inject liquid electrolyte into batteries, stepping up battery production by 10-fold.

The company believes that the new material can bring battery production costs down to just above 30,000 yen ($290) per kilowatt-hour, a decrease of more than 60 percent from around 100,000 yen ($976) today, according to a report in Nikkei.

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Sekisui Chemical plans to begin sample shipments to domestic and overseas battery manufacturers as early as next summer, with mass production to kick off in 2015. It is targeting annual sales of 20 billion yen by fully entering the business of automotive battery materials.

The first rule of reading such articles is to always remember that going from “Hey! Look what I made work in the lab!” to “You can buy it in the local car showroom/web site right now, at a less-than-excruciatingly high price” is a very, very difficult path. There’s almost no end of perverse things that can happen to trip up a new technology, from expensive materials and processes (including yield and scaling issues) to no end of political hassles, as in trying to get enough of Magic Ingredient X from a source that doesn’t want to sell it. (Sometimes it’s a wonder that any product more complex than a Slinky ever gets to market in mass quantities.) How will this particular breakthrough translate from lab to market? I have no bloody idea, and neither does anyone not working on it. Hell, I’d wager that most of the people working on it don’t know the answer to that question, simply because they’re experts in chemistry or packaging or materials science or whatever, and not economics and politics.

The second rule is to be on the lookout for hints about availability and price. The article makes it sound like this is not yet another case of vaporware, as it mentions samples reaching manufacturers in just a few months and production in 2015. But the price issue isn’t so rosy. That $290/kWh of capacity is certainly not the major step-change improvement we plug-in car geeks have been pining away for since, well forever. My understanding is that battery prices in production quantities are already under $400/kWh, so a roughly 25% reduction, while welcome, isn’t going to reshape the competitive landscape. On a car with a 24kWh battery pack, that’s a cost reduction of $2,640. Again, I’d rather have that cost drop than shun it, but it’s not going to get most of my neighbors into an EV overnight.

Another factor to consider is the much smaller battery volume, which is a nice ancillary benefit as it makes it much easier for EV makers to avoid the huge humps in some models (like the Focus EV).

So, is this the BBB we’ve all fantasized about? Probably not, but it sounds like a nice step in the desired direction.

And I would add that I’m still confident that somewhere, sometime very soon, we will see the BBB, simply because the economic benefits would be almost incalculable. Between turbo charging the EV movement and turning intermittent renewable energy into dispatchable power, the market for a “killer battery” technology is virtually unlimited for the first several decades after the breakthrough.

Scientists in Lyon, a French city famed for its cuisine, have discovered a quick-cook recipe for copious volumes of hydrogen (H2).

The breakthrough suggests a better way of producing the hydrogen that propels rockets and energizes battery-like fuel cells. In a few decades, it could even help the world meet key energy needs—without carbon emissions contributing to the greenhouse effect and climate change.

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In a microscopic high-pressure cooker called a diamond anvil cell (within a tiny space about as wide as a pencil lead), combine ingredients: aluminum oxide, water, and the mineral olivine. Set at 200 to 300 degrees Celsius and 2 kilobars pressure—comparable to conditions found at twice the depth of the deepest ocean. Cook for 24 hours. And voilà.

Where to begin? Microscopic cooker? Diamond anvil? Olivine and aluminum oxide? Heating to 200C to 300C? Does any of this sound, how shall I put this delicately, affordable or scalable? It sure doesn’t sound that way to me.

The only way to produce hydrogen at industrial scale now is by reforming natural gas or electrolyzing water. The first produces about 5.5 kg of CO2 for every kg of H2, and the second takes hideous amounts of electricity. And in either case, you then have to burn a lot of energy to compress the hydrogen to cram it into a 5,000 psi tank inside your vehicle. And even that’s assuming that you’re doing the hydrogen production in the gas station and not at some remote site and piping(!) or trucking(!!!) it to the filling station.

Please don’t mistake my comments here as a sign that I hope hydrogen fails. I would dearly love to see both EVs and HFCVs (hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) enjoy wild success and battle it out in the marketplace for years as drivers are happily reducing their marginal carbon emissions to practically zero. But the cost/infrastructure deck is so heavily stacked against hydrogen that it’s ever harder to justify spending more money on it as a motor vehicle fuel instead of using those funds to subsidize EVs or build additional publicly available EV chargers.

Battery technology seems to be advancing by slow evolutionary steps. That does not mean to say a break through isn’t possible, but with the benefit of hindsight, major breakthroughs have been promised to be just around the corner and are yet to be delivered many years later.For example, after 3 years on the road the range of the LEAF has advamced 3 miles, and that was due to weight saving and other efficiencies, no battery improvements in sight. The next advance Nissan promise is a heat tolerant chemistry, but no extra range.Maybe small steps every 5-10 years will get us to where we are going.

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Alex Cannara

December 20, 2013 03:01

The BBB is good. So is the work on the ultra-capacitor, which needs no dangerous chemistry and may be lighter and more power dense.However, we must remember what we’re trying to replace — a hand-held fuel hose delivering the chemical equivalent of ~10MW, to refuel a 300-mile range vehicle in a few minutes. Despite combustion engines wasting ~2/3 of that fuel’s energy, recharging equivalent EV batteries can’t presently be done at a 10MW rate.And, given how electromganetism works, we’d need to realtively gentle, evene in transferring charge to an ultra-capacitor.This is why battery swap, or electrolyte-transfer will likely be the future for EVs.

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Michael_Stavy

December 20, 2013 04:17

Well written. You know the technology and economics of BBB and H2. For information on the carbon content of H2 generated by electrolysis read my paper, The Carbon Content of Hydrogen Vehicle Fuel Produced By Hydrogen Electrolysis, February, 2005 Journal of Solar Energy Engineering, Vol. 127, Page 161.

One aspect of the economics missed out in the discussion is the relative cycle efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell and battery electric vehicles. If you take losses in the hydrolysis / fuel cell generation cycle into account, you need about twice as much primary energy for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle as for a BEV. Regarding the new Silicon based batteries, if weight and volume reduction of the battery pack including BMS and containment were to be of the order of 60% this could help to make electric vehicles significantly lighter and a little smaller for a given useful capacity (passenger and luggage space).Weight reduction would be both direct and indirect with reduced volume and weight allowing other smaller lighter components. For a similar battery capacity, it therefore seems to me that range might be increased by 5 to 10%.

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Cliff Claven

December 20, 2013 16:06

Lou,You wrote an excellent piece here. Great to hear from someone who appreciates both the technical details and the bigger picture of economics and infrastructure and real-world constraints. I agree that hydrogen as energy carrier is only practical for “hideously expensive” applications like space rockets, but that the BBB is what will change the world’s whole paradigm of electricity and certainly the fortunes of wind, solar, and EVs. However, with current state-of-the-art battery tech production energy density at about 500 Wh/kg and price at about 1 Wh/$, and the the absolute limits of chemical storage of electricity appearing to be about 3,500 Wh/kg, I’m not sure we are yet on the path to catch or surpass gasoline or diesel at 12,700 Wh/kg and 11,500 Wh/$ , which is what we will have to do to get our flying cars and hoverboards. We may have to store electricity in a form other than electrons, which brings us potentially to a novel nuclear solution.

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Cliff Claven

December 20, 2013 16:31

Alex,You paint a good word picture that communicates the magnitudes well. I may have to steal this one. Merry Christmas.

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Michael_Stavy

December 20, 2013 16:43

With this Energy Collective article’s discussion of private passenger vehicle energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy for private passenger vehicle (EV, HV) fuel let me point out that electric powered public transportation systems are already used in Europe, Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.) and certain US cities (Chicago, NYC, San Francisco, Boston, Denver etc.) are already energy efficient and can be powered with renewable energy. I was a member of a Fact-Finding Delegation that went to Germany, 17-21 Sept 2102, to study the topic, Innovations in Energy Efficient City Transit. The delegation was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and by the German/American Chambers of (AHK). The trip was very interesting. Go to http://tinyurl.com/8bneefk Increasing the energy efficiency of US City Transit is an important climate change mitigation strategy that will also improve the US Balance of Trade. I also took time from my 2013 4th of July holiday to make some videos of new Energy Efficiency in US City Transit. Go to http://goo.gl/1Wppp

Cliff Does this mean, at the wheel we get about 17% of the 12 KWH in the litre of petrol as mechanical energy.2.7 KWHAs for the 3.5 KWH of battery, we get about 2.9 Kwh of mechanical energy at the wheel.You dont have to be overly optimistic to realise with a few simple calculations that electric cars provide mechanical energy at the wheel at about 10% of the cost of petrol.

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Cliff Claven

December 21, 2013 16:35

When considering real-world applications like automobiles, we should perform a lifecycle analysis of all the fixed and variable costs. We can’t stop at just comparing drive-train efficiency, but have to consider fueling/charging and storage efficiency (only about 85% of the incoming electricity ends up in batteries), and the discharge losses that happen any time a battery is idle, and battery replacement costs over the life-span of a car, etc. The Tesla S is an informative example of the commercial state of the art. The Tesla loses as much as 10 miles of range per hour overnight. The batteries have to be kept within a temperature band to prevent freezing or catching fire, and this climate control as well as the unstoppable losses due to the chemistry involved together consume energy that Tesla owners are very familiar with and even have a name for — “vampire load.” If you live in a cold state, the energy consumed to keep the batteries warm eats owners alive unless they happen to park in a heated garage. And where is the Tesla’s electricity coming from? Mostly from fossil fuel plants with 30-60% thermal efficiency or nuclear plants with 10-20% thermal efficiency.And like anything, there is the tradeoff between variable costs of operation and fixed costs of ownership. A Tesla S with the 85 kWh battery pack is a $95K-$120K car (depending on options) that requires at least a home charging system if not multiple systems at distances not to exceed its 230 mile maximum practical range (as reported by actual owners). The average American’s home utility service itself will also need an upgrade to handle the higher power demand of the 220V charger. If the neighbors all decided to buy electric cars, the distribution grid itself would also need to be upgraded because everybody will be driving during the day and simultaneously charging their cars on 220V during the night, pulling more peak current. If the Tesla is driven like a regular car, it will require a new $18,000 battery pack every 5-8 years. When one does the math, it is not even close to a good business case over buying a conventional gasoline or diesel car.It is also not justifiable for GHG emissions. When the up-front emissions associated with the mining of the rare-earth elements and lithium and the manufacturing of all the batteries is taken into account and amortized over the life of the car, the emissions of a Tesla S per mile are higher than a Jeep Grand Cherokee (http://www.uniteconomics.com/files/Tesla_Motors_Is_the_Model_S_Green.pdf). It gets worse if including the alumimum body of the car which consumes five times the energy per pound as steel in its mining, milling, and manufacture.We can also compare electric and gasoline cars on a pure performance basis. If we take a $95K, 416 hp, 2012 Tesla S p85 and a $40K, 412 hp, 2012 Mustang GT, and strip away their bodies and extraneous weight and just compare the weight and performance of the energy storage and power train components, this is the data: – Tesla S: 682 kg weight, 455 kW/tonne specific power, 125 kWh/tonne energy storage – Mustang GT: 335 kg weight, 900 kW/tonne specific power, 249 kWh/tonne energy storageThe Mustang’s gasoline engine and liquid fuel and mechanical transmission and conventional differential and axles deliver twice the horsepower and twice the range per pound as the Tesla S for much less than half the price.So the media darling, non-green, highly subsidized electric roadster ($7,500-$15,000 per car in buyer credits plus more than $120 million to Tesla corporate in undeserved zero-emission credits from other car manufactures) remains a lifestyle choice personal statement for the rich with performance inferior to a mass-produced gasoline-powered muscle car. And for the true environmentalist, the far better choice would be a cost-effective, cross-country friendly, family-hauling, gasoline-engined mini-van or a high-efficiency diesel like a VW Polo that gets 81 MPG.

The second of the challenges for hydrogen are why the most realistic hydrogen electro-fuels are more likely to be Ammonia (NH4) or Methane (CH4) than hydrogen gas.The race is between battery cost per kwh and capital cost of solid state electrolysis technology, since the approach of over-supplying intermittent renewable capacity like windpower and PV and using surpluses to generate electro-fuels depends on the economics of electro-fuel production on a 25%-40% duty cycle.Add the extra energy cost of compressed natural gas on top of that, and that sets the economics of hydrogen as an electrofuel an additional substantial step behind that of ammonia or methane. And some solid-state technologies produce syngas ( http://www.ceramatec.com/technology/ceramic-solid-state-ionic-technologies/co2-benefication/solid-electrolysis-cells.php ) which is in some ways better suited for production of ammonia or methane than for production of hydrogen gas.